<?php
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 * Copyright © 2017 Alex Yst <mailto:copyright@y.st>
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$xhtml = array(
	'title' => 'Should I jack a shopping cart?',
	'body' => <<<END
<img src="/img/CC_BY-SA_4.0/y.st./weblog/2017/02/06.jpg" alt="A mysterious button on the wall outside a retail store" class="weblog-header-image" width="800" height="480" />
<section id="general">
	<h2>General news</h2>
	<p>
		One of my bosses halfway has me convinced that I should jack a shopping cart and use it to transport things from my mother&apos;s place to home.
		It&apos;s not like it would hurt anyone as long as I brought the shopping cart back when I was done.
		It might be the best way to get my mattress home.
		I still have time to consider other options though, as the mattress will be one of the final items that I bring home.
	</p>
	<p>
		My <a href="/a/canary.txt">canary</a> still sings the tune of freedom and transparency.
	</p>
</section>
<section id="university">
	<h2>University life</h2>
	<p>
		I wrote up my initial discussion post for the week.
		If I had had more time, I could have probably stitched it together better into a standalone post.
		As it, it seems to jump around a bit unless you know the questions that it was constructed to answer.
		I didn&apos;t feel right waiting to post it though, as I really should have completed it yesterday or the day before.
	</p>
	<blockquote>
		<p>
			Assuming that I understand correctly, a utilitarian monster is someone that has heightened abilities to feel pleasure, and potentially, heightened abilities to feel displeasure.
			Alternatively, they have the regular senses of pleasure and displeasure, but have heightened knowledge on how to best induce pleasure in themself.
			If my understanding is correct, the people running the lottery are not utilitarian monsters.
			They&apos;re not optimally spending their ill-gotten gains, even.
			The suffering that they inflict is greater than the happiness that they bring themselves and the winners.
		</p>
		<p>
			I can&apos;t even claim that the lottery winners are utilitarian monsters.
			They have no special skills that allow them to maximize happiness per dollar; they&apos;re just random people, many of which are as poor as I am.
			Add that to the administrative costs of the lottery and the public projects made from the lottery fund.
			The lottery winners don&apos;t even get 100% of the money taken from the lottery, or &quot;poor tax&quot;, as it could be called.
			I&apos;m not saying that they <strong>*should*</strong> get the full 100%, I&apos;m just saying that the suffering inflicted is greater than the joy felt by that one individual.
			To paint the lottery as positive at all, you have to take into account where else the money goes.
			Again though, that&apos;s not one individual or group maximizing happiness though, it&apos;s public projects that are supposed to improve everyone&apos;s happiness, so it doesn&apos;t fit the definition of a utilitarian monster.
		</p>
		<p>
			Setting up an argument in favor of the lottery can still be done without calling it a utilitarian monster though.
			People that play the lottery either know that they aren&apos;t going to win and play only for fun or, more often, they&apos;re fools.
			Fools aren&apos;t going to spend their money in such a way that it does the most good.
			The lottery is used to fund public projects that benefit us all.
			By tricking fools out of their money, we can put their money to good use, money that would otherwise likely be wasted on something petty.
		</p>
		<p>
			Setting up an argument opposed to the lottery is even easier.
			The lottery comes with a disclaimer saying that it&apos;s for entertainment only and not investment purposes.
			However, it&apos;s pretty clear that their target audience is fools that believe that they&apos;ll have good luck and actually win.
			Fools come in all wealth levels, but it&apos;s the desperate, poor fools that have a reason to take the risk to try to win.
			These poor people that have reason to take the risk are exactly the people who can least afford to lose!
			Of course, the odds are stacked against all the lottery gamblers, so they all (or technically, most) lose.
			In this way, the lottery is basically a poor fools&apos; tax.
			Instead of taxing those that can barely afford it and using those funds to fuel public projects, a better idea would be to outright tax the wealthy people who can absorb the cost without any noticeable suffering at all and use <strong>*that*</strong> to fund the public projects.
			This would noticeably lessen the burden on the poor while unnoticeably burdening the wealthy, for a net gain.
		</p>
		<p>
			It could be argued that the lottery is of benefit to all its gamblers, including the losers, because it provides a thrill.
			I don&apos;t agree with this standpoint though, and feel that the stress of losing when you didn&apos;t even have money to spare on the ticket is at least equal to, if not greater than, the thrill of the gamble.
			That said, I&apos;ve never understood the gambling mindset.
			Perhaps the thrill really is worth the loss.
			If that&apos;s indeed true, then the lottery would be ethically recommendable from a hedonistic utilitarian standpoint.
		</p>
		<p>
			From a strictly-utilitarianist standpoint, creating a bigger wealth gap is not necessarily the wrong action, but it likely is.
			It can be assumed that at a point, you can&apos;t get any happier.
			Giving the wealthy even more money by subjecting the poor into even deeper poverty would then at some point be causing more sadness than happiness.
			I also believe that money use and happiness don&apos;t correspond in a linear way.
			More likely, it&apos;s more exponential.
			For example, a person that has twice as much money isn&apos;t twice as happy.
			Down near the bottom of the wealth scale, you need money to meet your basic needs.
			A big part of your happiness comes from not starving, for example, or not having to stress about whether you&apos;ll be able to afford to pay your rent before accumulating late fees.
			Perhaps each time that wealth is doubled, your happiness only goes up by one unit.
			It would then stand to reason that each time your wealth is cut in half, your happiness only goes down one unit.
			By cutting one wealthy person&apos;s wealth in half then, you could barely lower their happiness while raising the happiness of so many others that would benefit by about as much each.
			This would result in a huge net gain in terms of happiness.
			Of course, the numbers that I worked with here were chosen to be easy to work with, not accurate, but you get the point.
		</p>
	</blockquote>
</section>
END
);
